


Tomb of the Trolls

by Outside_Context_Problem



Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game), Homestuck
Genre: And probably fail horribly, I try to divine what parts of the canon characters are nature vs nurture, Meh, Multi, NEEEERRRRRDS
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-03-24
Updated: 2014-06-26
Packaged: 2017-11-02 11:28:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,645
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/368506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Outside_Context_Problem/pseuds/Outside_Context_Problem
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A thief, a wild-woman, a knight, and a mageseer walk into a tomb…<br/>The dungeon master says "Enjoy the complimentary bowl of dice. I am an excellent host."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Derse

**Author's Note:**

> Whenever I feel like taking a break from sci-fi Homestuck I'll probably be writing this. So yeah, totally escaping the genre fiction ghetto here, honestly.
> 
> I have not yet decided if I am going to be nerdy enough to use actual PC abilities or (nerd overload) actually roll dice. It depends how bored/inspired I get!

"You are to go to the **Tomb of the Trolls** in the Valley of Alternia," the Imperiat of Derse declared in a commanding, harmonic voice. "There you will find the body of the crimson-blooded troll and destroy it, before the monster can arise at the Twin Perigee to bring ruin and chaos to all."

The thief picked his teeth with a little knife. Two and a half years imprisonment for assaulting guardsmen, breaking into the royal vault, and impudence towards the Imperial Personage, before this miraculously generous offer, had done little for his manners.

The wild-woman said nothing, though she leaned heavily on her long, straight stave of heartwood. Her deep green eyes stared through the curtain of her unkempt black hair at the Imperiat, and had since the start of the audience.

The mageseer nodded, closing her eyes as she did so. The city folk said she could see things in the darkness of closed lids, that destiny unraveled in the shadows she looked into.

The knight rolled the pommel of his sword around, slapping the scabbard lightly against his hip. He was loyal to no cause save his employer's, but the Imperiat had already paid him up front quite handsomely.  
"It will be done, by saga and sign," he drawled in his lowlands accent. None of the others spoke or moved. With a barely-concealed twitch of eyebrow and lip, he tilted his head at the great doors to the Chamber of Audience. "Out, vagabonds. The Imperiat is done with you." He gave a fist-to-chest honor to the Imperial personage before following them, the salute of an order from a distant place, an order long dead.

They had made it out of the city of Derse before they began fighting each other.  
The mageseer and the wild-woman were staring daggers at each other by the time the Knight caught up to them with the horses. The thief juggled his set of hammers, the cruel jester's smirk still perched on his lips.

"No reason to do what any noble or monarch wants, let alone the dark ones of Derse," the wild-woman growled, canines bared.

The mageseer stared her down blankfaced. "Derse is my home. And do you truly doubt the Imperiat's threat? She knows where your little dwelling in the swamp is, she knows where your pet sleeps and how to kill it."

The wild woman leaned heavily on her staff, which flexed. The knight hardly had time to realize what it was before she had her bow strung. "You think you know everything, tower-wizard? You've only looked to the past. I know the future. I've seen it in the waters."

The mageseer withdrew from her robes a pristine white ball, which drifted into the air in front of her. "But a simple problem to fix, swamp prophet. I only need look-"  
An arrow tore the orb from its place, smashing it to the ground, yet it remained utterly unmarred. The mageseer did not shift her expression as she bent over to pick it up. "Your meaning?" she asked the archer, though her calm tone was really anything but.

"What I see is just parts and possibles. If you look, we'll have no future but what you see."

"Agree." It was the first the thief had spoken, and his voice was deep for such a skinny little man. His hammers and picks were back at his belt, and his arms crossed. "I'll be my own destiny if y'don't mind. Now, the Imperiat's enough to hound me life, so I'm to getting her task, and getting nice away."

The knight responded with his own first words (since the audience, anyway). "Drop the cant, your garbled speech is tiring. We're all afraid enough of the Imperiat's threat to have come to her to begin with, so let's all admit we're to do this task and be done with it." He said that with a blank stare at the wild-woman and the mageseer.

The mageseer nodded, her words cool but barely covering her disdain. "That was what I had intended from the start."

The wild-woman had already slung her bow across her back. "I'm going already! I just hoped I could spit in fate's eye first. Little chance of that now, Dersite order-bound killjoys…" The last comment was not meant to be overheard, but living as a hermit could quickly make a person forget the right loudness or quietness for speaking to other people.

The pale-haired knight and mageseer exchanged a knowing glance, which the thief walked blithely through, taking pace with his raven-haired fellow, though neither thief nor wild-woman commented on their own Prospitian similarities.

The knight took the rearguard, and whether this was to safeguard the mageseer, to honorably ward against ambush, from trust to the speed of thief and wild-woman, or from callousness at their risk, he could not say.

Jade Harl's Leah and John Ecgbeorht walked first into the Valley of Alternia, but Rose of the Grove and Sir Dave Strider were not all too far behind.


	2. Derse II

Strider had not sought this duty, but what was a masterless knight to do? He was of Derse, after all - _truly_ of Derse, born an orphan in the days when the shimmering tyrian city was no more than a small town in the lee of great mountains. Raised by his brother as a Guardsman of Derse, then chosen for sheer potential as a Knight of the Echo, as his brother had been years before.

And Sir Dave Strider had been the only survivor of the Knights of the Echo - a thousand men and women, every one of them dying to the last to push back the Prospitian zealots and conquerers for just one more day. All save him, the youngest Knight. Locked away. Betrayed and trapped by his own brother, forced to survive. At what cost? For what reason?

The Cult of the Red Sun held Derse for many years, but they collapsed from within, a Prospit rebellion gutting the fanatics' support. That, a hundred years ago, a thousand years since Strider had slept, had led to the Imperiat's rise. His Derse had been a mess of councils and guilds, chaotic and haphazard as Prospit still was, but the Imperiat had instilled order deep into the city's character, one rod at a time.

He had yet to determine if he truly cared.

But for now he was paid, and he had a duty. The Trolls were a threat. Not the _trolls_ \- those brutes could tear a man apart, yes, but the degenerate descendants were nothing compared to their titanic progenitors, the beasts that had rivaled the gods. And there was prophecy, dark prophecy, about the Twin Perigee to come, as both worlds above would be seen together for the first time in ten thousand years.

No doubt that was why the mageseer spent so much time entranced in her orb of visions.

Or not. Sir Strider was not enough of a fool to think everyone as singularly driven as him. No doubt she spent time searching her companions for secrets, plumbing the depths of the past - and, he suspected, the future, whatever the wild-woman wanted.

Not that he was entirely adverse to the wants of Jade Harl's Leah. But as good to look for an open face on a Dersite as for a consistent mind in a Prospitian.

 

The thief certainly had no problems with changing his mind constantly. Some called him flighty, windswept. He laughed, sometimes. Other times he threw back words - or knives. His anger was rare, but his wrath was swift - and complete.

All in all, he liked his reputation. For a Prospit orphan without a father or lineage, fear was as good as respect - and often they were the same thing anyway.

That hadn't been the wisest attitude for him to bring to Derse, though. He'd terrified the guards at the royal vaults, yes, but they hadn't stopped or fled like any Prospit gang would've. They'd kept coming, even after he'd started fighting to kill.

He'd learned from that, though. And from three years in the dark dungeon. The lessons lived behind baby-blue eyes and a disarming smile.

And if he broke out laughing some times when everyone else was silent?

He _was_ a very merry fellow.

 

The wild-woman moved at the fore of their small column, alone and unconcerned. She didn't fear what was ahead - after all, it lay in the future, and that more than anything was what she knew. Out in the moors of Prospit, at the edge of the known world, where the marshes melded with the Everstill Sea, a place where she was the only life on two legs, she saw visions in the water, reflections of clouds not in this world. She knew they were visions of the future, both because some had come true, and because that is simply something one _knows_ when one sees visions.

So she had no fear of what lay ahead.

Guilt, though? Perhaps a little. She'd told none of them, even the Prospit trickster, what lay ahead. They might hate her for that in days to come, but it had to be done! To free the knowledge from her mind would paradoxically lock down the future with chains of certainty. And worse, she would force it to be a future she only half-knew, changed by the very act of others knowing.

 

The mageseer had wasted no time forcing the future to parade in front of her eyes. She had no particular disdain for the feral cunning woman, at least no more than her disdain for every other human, but she would not be dictated to by anyone.

Nor did she ply her craft for free, and so she kept silent about the things illuminated behind the darks of her eyelids.

Truth unfiltered, unseasoned by the craft of lies, was so… bland.


End file.
